A Relaxed Law and a Strict Gospel

Rome, too, affirmed the need for forgiveness and grace, with its own provisions for sin through sacrifices and penance. Furthermore, the Reformers never argued that Paul’s opponents had no place for grace, forgiveness, and sacrifice. Rather, they were convinced that, like the medieval church, the Jewish believers in Galatia had confused law and gospel, grace and works, promise and conditionality, Abraham and Sinai. Justification is either by works or by grace, but it cannot be both.
…Monocovenantalism old and new attempts to combine merit and grace, and the result is that both concepts are weakened… both the justice of God in upholding his righteous law and his mercy in satisfying its conditions himself are eclipsed–or, better, both his justice and his mercy are relativized by each other instead of being held together simultaneously in their integrity. The end product is a relaxed law and a demanding gospel.
- Michael S. Horton, “Which Covenant Theology,” in Covenant, Justification and Pastoral Ministry (ed. R. Scott Clark, Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Company), 199-201.